The first fire that made me a better manager
After a successful funding round mid-2017, I dove into a hiring spree and built a team of 12 people in just three months. A year later, we had made substantial progress and raised our second round, but it was a bittersweet milestone. I had to manage out my first hire.
There were several reasons behind the decision: poor fit, failed expectations, and personality mismatches. But one of the reasons is that I was new to running a business from scratch and new to hiring.
For this venture, I switched from building enterprise cloud services to creating a consumer device, and almost everything from design to development was new to me. When the initial funding came through, I had enough instincts to realize that we need research to define the product experience. I first hired an experienced user researcher hoping that would suffice without realizing the risk of his specialty being in UX research and UX research only. Very soon, a bottleneck on exploratory research studies appeared: all parts of the product development demanded input from customers and market, especially to validate our marquee use case, to define the industrial design (ID, which can be highly polarizing), to map out the product positioning, and to evaluate pricing. The amount of generic customer research and market research skyrocketed, and core UX research shrank to less than 25% of his work. And we did not see the outcome we needed.
As a lean team without headcount for additional researchers, he and I (as the CEO and the only product person) divvied up the work. I should have seen it coming that this chaotic setup in an early-stage startup might not jive well with someone whose strength lies in scaling research programs with processes and SLAs.
But I was too busy to notice, and he was too passionate and product to admit. We tried hard to make it work. Until I realized that I was asking a million questions for every research insight he shared because it didn't move our product forward. That I needed to redo the work when I desperately needed sleep. That we would butt heads in our weekly 1:1 meetings over whether to prioritize producing process documents for our tiny team over addressing another research request. And the stress made it increasingly hard for us to work with each other. Something went very wrong.
We reached to a breaking point after the second round of funding. After the celebration, we had a long talk. My researcher told me he didn't feel recognized, and I shared my frustration over the low quality and velocity of work despite the best intentions. We were silent for a bit. I knew that he wanted to deliver a great job, but he'd need a different structure to be at his best, and we need someone with a different skillset and a more fungible mentality.
We reached a mutual agreement that the best next step was for him to move forward, and we started hiring his backfill. It was as painful for him as for me to go through the "firing process" - as a first-time manager it hit me hard that my employee, someone I deeply respected and possessed so much industry experience, failed to perform.
This experience has taught me that the best investment a leader makes is to hire the right talent in the first place. Here is what I mean by "right":
Is there a good match between the competencies required by the role and those offered by the candidate?
Do those areas energize the candidate?
Does the candidate's style of operation (e.g., more fungible/scrappy vs. process-driven) match with the stage of the product development?
Does the candidate have the potential/interest to grow as the product evolves?
Does the candidate share the same value as your organization?
Net-net: the hiring manager should know enough about the scope and the risks of the role to assess the must-have competencies. I am not saying that the manager must know everything about how to get the job done: managers should hire people who are better and who can compliment them. I am arguing that the managers should know what critical skillsets that would increase the chance of business success, and know just enough so that you know when things are wrong. For example, I wish I had done more homework about the nuance about the ID and business model of Gen-I consumer devices to know that my team needed a wide range of research support beyond UX research. These days there are so many ways to learn: network coffee chats, blogs, podcasts, videos. Do our homework.
This experience also taught me that it's a manager's job to help employees grow, even though it means making a hard decision so that they can grow somewhere else. Yes, managers coach and provide feedback. Ultimately, managers should stay in touch with the reality: does the employee's growth path align with your business? If not, it's best to support the employee to transition and shine somewhere else. This long-term view earns manager respect and reputation as a trustworthy leader.
Lastly, people management is a skill that one can only get better with practice. Recognize that we are going to be imperfect and adopt a "growth mindset" is a good start.
These reflections helped me think through my hiring plan and how I coach my team members. Since 2018, I created a new team of four product managers with zero attrition, and two of them are now on the promotion slate. I have so much gratitude to my team for living through my transformation. I share my lessons and wish you a fun ride too.
